Arnaud's lazy log (Russian & co)

[neofight78]

- I've read 10% of Гиперболоид инженера Гарина. Well, I don't know if I want to continue, the book is not bad but it's too difficult for my current level (around 8% of uw) and it's not exactly a masterpiece (but I'm reading it too slowly to really appreciate it: sci-fi books are made for fast-pace reading, not spending one hour on one page after having searched 40 unknow words). Plus, I've noticed that the edition I was reading was different from the audiobook I've found. A little search on Wikipedia showed that the author wrote 4 versions of his book, cutting here, adding there, so I had to change of edition to follow the audio.

Interesting, thanks for the heads up on the different editions.

- I definitively have an enormous problem of understanding when I listen to audiobooks, so I've started again to work on Человек-амфибия, as I have a complete list of the vocabulary. I try to listen a chapter until I can understand it, sometimes I read aloud repeating after the speaker when I place the stress on the wrong place in my head.

What level of comprehension counts as understanding here? I tend to read a chapter and listen afterwards reading along. I don't really pay much attention to how much I understand when listening. Perhaps I should, I don't know.

- That neverending list of unknown vocab is depressing : On Italki someone asked the question "what's the difference between скрыться, спрятаться and прибрать?" And I could ask that kind of questions for a ton of verbs I meet everyday: which verb in which context ? What's the subtle difference between this and that ? Generally I don't have the answer. It's frustrating. Russian is frustrating and the more I progress the more I feel my knowledge of that language is superficial and fragile. Something definitively didn't work, but I don't know what: perhaps the lack of teachers to explain why this and not that. I've too many unanswered questions and they keep on accumulating.

Vocabulary is brutal, especially when you start reading fiction. To me there seems to be three levels of difficulty with Russian words:

• Dictionary is enough - when there is a more or less direct L1 equivalent, or maybe it maps to 2/3 words. In any case the meaning is fairly clear.
• Explanation is enough - it requires some explanation to get to the bottom of the meaning and afterwards it makes sense.
• Only exposure is enough - dictionaries and explanations don't seem to make things clear. Only after lots of exposure does the word make sense and become clear.

The first two are where the word can be learned consciously and are the least frustrating. The third group you just have to accept will take time. You can perhaps speed up the process by finding and going through lots of example sentences.

It makes more sentence to concentrate of the first group of words, it's more time efficient. If it seems like an important word, then investing the time to seek out an explanation may make sense. The third group takes a lot of effort, and basically it's better just to park those words and just accepting they will become only completely clear to you with time.

At list that's how I see it. I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences.

[aaleks]

- That neverending list of unknown vocab is depressing : On Italki someone asked the question "what's the difference between скрыться, спрятаться and прибрать?"

When I read this the first time I was puzzled how прибрать had got in the list . Both cкрыться and спрятаться could mean hide/hiding, прибрать is - cleaning up/tidying up. Although I think I can guess what could be confusing about these words for non-natives.

To me there seems to be three levels of difficulty with Russian words:

Not only with Russian words .
I agree about a lot of exposure. And because I don't use words list for me it's the only possible way to deal with such words.

[Arnaud]

Vocabulary is brutal, especially when you start reading fiction. To me there seems to be three levels of difficulty with Russian words:

• Dictionary is enough - when there is a more or less direct L1 equivalent, or maybe it maps to 2/3 words. In any case the meaning is fairly clear.
• Explanation is enough - it requires some explanation to get to the bottom of the meaning and afterwards it makes sense.
• Only exposure is enough - dictionaries and explanations don't seem to make things clear. Only after lots of exposure does the word make sense and become clear.

The first two are where the word can be learned consciously and are the least frustrating. The third group you just have to accept will take time. You can perhaps speed up the process by finding and going through lots of example sentences.

Yes, my problem is that I rarely have access to #2 (except throught internet when I ask questions on Italki) and that #3 is rather limited if I consider my 2 or 3 hours of daily reading/listening as the only source of exposure.
Anyway, end of the complaint for now: I gave up Гиперболоид инженера Гарина and started again Голова профессора Доуэля that I had started about 6 months ago. I'm going to read again what I had read (8 chapters) and continue, it seems that Беляев is the only author I can read for the time being

[smallwhite]

... That neverending list of unknown vocab is depressing...
... It's frustrating. Russian is frustrating and the more I progress the more I feel my knowledge of that language is superficial and fragile. Something definitively didn't work, but I don't know what: perhaps the lack of teachers to explain why this and not that. I've too many unanswered questions and they keep on accumulating.

Can't say what didn't work, but I'm doing it differently from you in Greek.

68 days of reading and a list of around 2100 words that I've looked in the dictionary.

16 days of reading in August and I have 1406 words looked up AND every single one Quizlet'ed. So a word is only ever unknown the first time I encounter it. The second time, I'd already know it. Alongside that, I also study word lists casually. So some words are already known before I encounter them in a book, and I can concentrate on their usage, or just move on and concentrate on other harder words. 55% of words learnt from reading and 45% from lists at the moment. 53 words/day so far and 2 hours/day including reading, card creation and revision, everything. 101 days in and I'm understanding 91-96% of the words in my fiction and 94% in my nonfiction.

Parallel reading also helps keep sanity.

[BOLIO]

Arnaud,

What a great amount of work and success you have had. At this stage, if I could give you a time machine and you could go back and do it all again, what would your language plan be to tackle Russian from scratch?

You inspire others with your consistent and hard work.

Thanks in advance,

BOLIO

[Arnaud]

Arnaud,

What a great amount of work and success you have had. At this stage, if I could give you a time machine and you could go back and do it all again, what would your language plan be to tackle Russian from scratch?

You inspire others with your consistent and hard work.

Thanks in advance,

BOLIO

Thanks, but honestly I think that people like Neofight, Ogrim, Tarvos (sorry for those I don't name) are really more sucessful than me.

I've started with Michel Thomas, Assimil and later I added a textbook called Ruslan 2 (more grammar-orientated than Assimil) and I think that was a good choice, so I wouldn't change that. It worked rather well and I had pleasure to do that.
One thing important, imho, is to imitate what you hear and not being influenced by the alphabet. A lot of beginners who learn alone pronounce the words as they read them, not as they hear them, and the result is not good, as they don't respect the reading rules (reduction of the vowels out of the stress, reduction of the voiced consonants inside and at the end of words, etc). MT was very good for that, because at the beginning I didn't know the alphabet (too difficult, lol) and during several months I simply repeated what I was hearing without reading: it's when I started Assimil that I saw how tricky the alphabet can be if you don't respect the reading rules and don't know where the stress is placed.

It's after Assimil and Ruslan 2 that I was more or less stuck and didn't know how to progress, so I read and listened to other textbooks (kind of Peter Mollenburg's syndrom) and I think that was a mistake and a great loss of time. I should have activate what I knew by speaking/writing with native speakers, by reading graded-readers to improve my vocab, by watching simple native videos like cartoons subtitled in english, etc, instead of revising, consolidating and doing too many grammar exercices, reading again Assimil, reading Ruslan again, etc. At that moment I wasn't really conscious of two things : how far from the real language the textbooks are, and how enormous the quantity of vocab you need to feel at ease in russian, especially to read.
1. Real russian as spoken by native speakers (especially young adults) has nothing to do with the russian you learn in textbooks, so the sooner you stop using textbooks, the better. Textbooks are just a stepping stone to reach the first bar of the ladder, but they are too artificial. Just maintain your basic grammar with a few exercices from time to time, if you feel you need it, and use native contents asap, even if it seems difficult at first sight: there is an ever increasing quantity of material on YouTube/Internet that you can use.
2. The quantity of vocab you need is astronomical, I think everybody agrees on that. To acquire the vocab more rapidly, I think that studying roots is a good idea : the number of roots is rather limited, it's the permutations of the prefix1-prefixN-root-suffix that give that enormous amount of possibility to form words. Knowing well your roots and prefixes+suffixes will help you to guess the meaning of words from context, because when you learn russian from scratch as a westerner, you have almost zero cognates at your disposal to help you: you have to create for yourself a kind of mental directory of building blocks, roots and "russian cognates" : a little exemple to be clearer: when you meet недобросовестный for the first time, if you know your roots, you see 3 words: не+добр+совесть+(adjectival ending -ный): not+kind+conscious that is translated as unscrupulous. You see the idea, a lot of languages are working on that model but as long as you don't have the basic building blocks and roots, you can't use that method.
3. How many words, then ? Smallwhite wrote in a previous message that with 5000 words in greek she knows 90% of the words of her book. Well, with 5000 words in russian, you can do nothing and certainly not read a book. That's pretty clear when you read Blaurebell's log: her frontal attack with LWT on translated books showed very well how difficult it is to reach a decent percentage of known words in a short amount of time: at the time being and after several months of intense work, she's very far from 90%.
Myself after having read Assimil (sans peine+perfectionnement) which gives about 7500 words and the textbook of Patapova which gives 8000 words, I was unable to read children books. I had to add several graded-readers and transcripts of series during a long time to be able to reach a level where I could start to read and be under 10% of unknown words.

[smallwhite]

Smallwhite wrote in a previous message that with 5000 words in greek she knows 90% of the words of her book. Well, with 5000 words in russian, you can do nothing and certainly not read a book.

That was not quite what I wrote and mean. For 5000 words to cover 90%, you have to know your morphology like you said, you have to pick your 5000 words wisely, and, the main idea of my message, you have to remember your 5000 words, and be fast per word. But I know how Russian-learners see "Russian is hard" in everything

[Arnaud]

Smallwhite wrote in a previous message that with 5000 words in greek she knows 90% of the words of her book. Well, with 5000 words in russian, you can do nothing and certainly not read a book.

That was not quite what I wrote and mean. For 5000 words to cover 90%, you have to know your morphology like you said, you have to pick your 5000 words wisely, and, the main idea of my message, you have to remember your 5000 words, and be fast per word. But I know how Russian-learners see "Russian is hard" in everything

I'm waiting to see your exploit

[Arnaud]

Russian:
I've read again the 7 first chapters of Голова профессора Доуэля in 2 days only: rather a good pace when I don't have to look for the vocab in the dictionary. I'm starting the 8th chapter with 5.4% of unknown words, about the same percentage as in Человек-амфибия.

[smallwhite]

I'm waiting to see your exploit

I'd like to know Russian but I lack motivation. If only I could get paid for learning it...